Char Davies: how the physical can trigger the emotional with technology

Char Davies' article gave me some great ideas for ways to expand my project if I ever had the skills or the tools or the budget.

She says that virtual reality is a place where "our minds may float among three-dimensionally extended yet virtual forms in a paradoxical combination of the ephemerally immaterial with what is perceived and bodily felt to be real."

With my project focusing on memories, decisions, and fictional stories, I picture the way people make connections in their brain. I kind of see it as an "osmose", not of worlds, but of snapshots and home movies in your mind. It's kind of like what Davies says, how it seems to be so real when you think deeply about it, but the memory isn't real and can change every time you think back to it.

If I could make a virtual reality version of my project the viewer would slowly move through white fog uncovering black and white pieces of a past. After a certain amount of time there would be two paths and the body would lean one way or another to choose a direction, showing that it's not all about how you think and compare options, but sometimes just a physical gut feeling. At that point there would be less fog and photos/videos would appear quicker in a more forced way and some color would begin to appear, showing that the specific path you chose is taking it's form in reality and you can't go back. Man, if only I had the equipment.

It is such an awesome thing to think about, because it is not just interactive, but immersive. In our pieces the audience is engaged in the art, but with Osmose the audience is IN the piece.


I like her idea of "dehabituating of perception" and that someone will be receptive to new things rather than defensive. I think that works because of her emphasis that virtual reality needs to have an environment different in some way from our real one. It would be interesting to see if the same effect of tranquility and loss of inhibition from Osmose came over people if the simulation was an exact copy of a a busy city avenue, or if it had to be that same street but without people, or without color, or some other alteration of reality.

Something else I thought about was that if this experience based on the physical movement of the body alters the mental and emotional, can something where the mind leads the experience then make the body act in a certain way?


This video is also interesting because it shows how far you can go with the technology. If you were literally walking and ducking through a virtual space (rather than just leaning like in Davies' piece), imagine how much more you may or may not explore and your piece could be come so much more personal and immersive for the viewer.

Recombinant Theater and Digital Resistance

This article discusses that digital is taking over analog completely in information and communications technology, and beginning to in other fields. Practically, people want the digital (replication). But part of them still wants to have options (analog). It's interesting to think of objects like clothing in this way, because usually these terms are tied to technology. Analog (unique options) are considered high fashion, because they are so different and rare, whereas digitally replicated options are convenient but not special.
To apply this idea to art would be like a painting where there is only one copy, versus a piece that is copied and reproduced for mass production. I feel like even though Duchamp took a mass produced object, that still did not make his art digital. The object was digital before he took it out of it's normal location, but by putting it somewhere unique and attempting to give it a new meaning I believe he actually brought it back to analog.

Recombinant theater (according to Critical Art Ensemble) is where there is a performance in a public space and people can come in and out and they all add to it in a way. It is and it is not analogic. It is not because there is not just one person (i.e. director) speaking for society. It is analogic because each performance will never be replicated exactly again.

Thinking about analog and digital in the current art world would be helpful to create works that entice people because they are unique, but still similar enough to other pieces. It can promote interactivity with the audience and any other method that will make it unable to be replicated, if that is what the artist wants. With digital technology as a medium, an analog concept would juxtapose nicely.

Dick Higgins Intermedia: What the heck is he talking about?

Dick Higgins

The first thing to pop up in my head was a great, big "WHAT?!" when I read "We are approaching the dawn of a classless society, to which separation into rigid categories is absolutely irrelevant."
Sure, it is very interesting and true and worth thinking about that art and society can go hand in hand. And it is also true that in the days of the extreme class system, art was extremely categorized. Now it is not so much. But to say that society is also going to be classless is just false. If he had said that society is making it easier to cross class lines, while many certain classes are still rigidly stuck where they are, that would be more true of society and of art. Because while art is taking so many new forms (based on medium and/or concept), there are still paintings that are just paintings and people still have affection for the "original" types of art.


But getting to the point of the article: INTERMEDIA.
The way Higgins describes intermedia, it is basically a concept with the mediums forming around it. It is a comprehensive, interdisciplinary method to combine different subjects and see how they interact to result in a certain effect. Intermedia is constantly changing until the mediums match up to convey a conceptual idea. I think that Higgins' explanation makes a lot of sense and does a nice job of showing the difference between mixed media and intermedia, which I did not know before.
I do disagree that found objects are intermedia though. He believes this just because they don't conform to a pure medium. But even if the artist has a concept to go along with the object, I believe something more has to be done with it to make it intermedia and to strengthen the idea.